Les Moore – Son of Stuck Funky

All Apologies

Last time, we saw Summer’s on-the-court play take a step up only to run into a wall when she and her team got trounced. She’d also gotten caught up in the ongoing love triangle between her father and two women with rather poor taste. Despite Les and Cayla officially being a thing, TB saw need to throw doubt on the relationship as Susan Smith — that sinister suicidal succubus — proceeded to butt her way into things, a process made all the easier because Les is an oblivious moron and Cayla is a character with absolutely no spine. Summer’s importance after the first few months took a backseat as Batty began diving into fiction’s most laughably unbelievable love triangle and unfortunately for her, 2011 is going to go much the same way as 2010 for a while.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel as Batty will finally put this interminable storyline to rest. But not before he goes in guns blazing, pushing Summer out of the way in the process. Right from the jump, 2010 ends with Cayla and Susan at Les’ New Year’s party. As the clock ticks closer and closer to midnight, they both anxiously look around for their dickheaded dreamboat, each hoping to be the one that he rings in 2011 with.

But alas, the bespectacled beefcake is already claimed as they find him instead making out with the ghost of his dead wife who, need I remind you, called in a bomb threat just a week or so earlier.

*“It was romantic,” he later thought to himself. “Her ghostly lips tasted of Ecto Cooler.”*

Summer and Keisha, meanwhile, decide to ring in the new year with a little one-on-one.

But Keisha either intended this whole game as a ruse to talk about important issues or she simply resorted to dirty tricks once she started losing to Summer. Both are equally plausible.

Dissatisfied with Summer’s inability to know what her dad is thinking at all times, Keisha then decides to switch it up.

*“She’s a whore, Summer, that’s what i mean. Anyone who stands against my mother and that handsome stud muffin is.”*

Keisha says that maybe the two of them should try nudging their parents closer together and Batty decides to end the week with a fancy (for him) narrative transition to show Les being an absolute prick under the guise of him just being a little frazzled. Of course, we know better.

After some “hilarious” Dinkle and the Band shenanigans, it’s another of Les’ endless book tours with some never before seen college friend of Les, since Batty never ever shows his characters actually attending college 99% of the time. He spends the entire trip back from the airport muttering to himself like a complete lunatic about Summer’s chances in the tournament but it seems fate had different plans.

We’re then regaled with the tale of the destruction of Summer’s knee along with the death Les’ dreams of not having to shell out money for his daughter’s higher education.

Having watched five too many inspirational sports movies and conflating them with real life, Batty decides to have the Lady ‘Goats do the logical thing and forefeit the friggin’ game to “be with their co-captain.” Because that’s something real teams do all the time of course and not just a cheap attempt at trying to wring sentimental pathos out of this wet rag of a story.

*And then the ghost of Brian Piccolo showed up and said “If you build it, you can win one for the Gipper,”* while Rudy stood in the doorway and nodded.

In a show of good sportsmanship, the other team refused the forfeit meaning the game was going to be replayed (does this actually happen?) much to Summer’s delight.

Summer will, of course, need surgery but not quite yet which she’s also happy about because it means she gets to inspirationally cheer her teammates on.

But alas, this strip is a quarter-inch from reality and thus unlike an inspirational sports movie or an anime where good vibes and the power of friendship can will even the smallest minnow to victory, Summer’s encouragement doesn’t prevent the team from losing and ending their season. Which kind of makes it seem like Central Catholic was so offended by the whole forfeit thing that they refused it simply so they could kick the asses of the She-Goats once more for good measure. Just to show them who’s boss.

With the tournament done, Summer now has to get her knee surgery and Cayla’s there to support Les in what’s obviously his hour of need. But oh no, that horrible harlot has decided to make her presence known here too!

But that’s not all! With Summer’s surgery a success, Bull shows up at Chateau Moore to offer his services and help Summer rehab her knee.

This is but one of the many acts of kindness that Bull has paid and will pay to his former victim that will go unappreciated by Les. Instead, Les and Cayla will opine about how awkward it is that his former bully is now helping his daughter as if he and Bull hadn’t been friends since before Summer was even born. To cap things off, the vile vixen also stops by to bring Summer’s homework and of course Les has to get in a snide little remark.

*At least Linda didn’t come by to kill the mood and tell Summer that trying to rehab her knee would be pointless.*

After a month or so of Dinkle, Owen and Cody’s nonsense, it’s back to Summer’s knee but not before TB decides to off the long-retired Coach Stropp.

Summer talks to Bull a bit about he and her dad knowing one another. This is the infamous week where it’s revealed that Bull’s bullying of Les was actually a ruse the whole time cooked up to protect Les from even worse bullies. A revelation that is utterly pointless as like so many other things with Bull and Les after Act I, it’s promptly ignored.

Summer, who’d been largely positive about her rehab, is now starting to feel the effects of inactivity which has made her cranky. But she’s about to get cheered up by a certain Saint’s Son.

*She will always be the only person in existence, both in reality and probably in-universe, excited to ever see him.*

After about 3 and a half years, Darin and his bride creep their way back into the comic to take their rightful place amongst the main cast. Well Darin does anyway as he and his funny books crew will come to increasingly dominate the strip; Jessica just kind of hangs around. We learn that he accepted a buy out from wherever he was working for unspecified reasons (they went under? who knows) and is effectively a jobless, homeless bum. Except not really because Les immediately gets him a job at, where else, Montoni’s and allows Darin to move in with them.

Summer’s excited but Cayla isn’t because god forbid she ever be proactive about anything in her life.

*“Oh, I did nothing and got nowhere because of it! Woe is me!”*

After the requisite month’s worth of strips is spent on reintroducing Darin to the strip’s dozens of readers, we move on to the next part of this grand tapestry that Tom Batiuk so skillfully weaves. Ann Apple, the homeless schizoid-turned-literary agent, calls to tell Les that someone wants to option Lisa’s Story into an actual movie. And not just anyone, but Hollywood! Yes, the entirety of the film industry is apparently just some monolithic entity and it needs to feed itself on the self-pitying misery literature produced by a mediocre and delusionally self-important high school English teacher.

Summer, being slightly more proactive than either her father or his milksop girlfriend, decides to take matters into her own hands when Les begins to falter.

Well that should be the end of it but Les himself has to agree which means a week of him sitting on a bench and talking to Ghost Lisa about all the ways in which Hollywood will ruin it. Personally I feel like all they’d need to do is give it a more accurate title; Tuesdays with Boring should work.

In the end, the spectral Lisa is able to set Les straight and get him to agree to it.

*Why experience the awfulness in just one format?*

With everything coming up Les, he and Cayla sit on the Sacred Throne aka the porch swing and Cayla decides to tell Les “I love you.” Les can only fumble around like an idiot and not say the words back which upsets Cayla who decides they should put the brakes on things for the moment. This is mostly a test to try and get Les to stop being an idiot and Les, predictably, fails it.

But Cayla has made a mistake and the terrible temptress decides to make her move and fill the newly opened up woman-shaped hole in Les’ life. Alone in a classroom, Susan locks lips with the hunky man of her dreams.

Les now, finally, realizes that he has two women in love with him and decides to tell Funky and Crazy Harry about his dilemma. Funky and Crazy do what any reasonable people would do when confronted with the idea of Les the Lothario and proceed to laugh in his face. This pisses him off and causes him to storm out of Montoni’s like a baby.

We then get what is an all-timer in terms of Les’ unwarranted self-importance where Funky is forced to apologize to him and he snidely tells Funky “yes you did” to Funky’s admission that he went too far.

And it’s not just Funky as Cayla comes by to also apologize to Les for getting upset at him being an emotionally stunted dunce.

Keisha decides to send her mother a little image she just so happened to have.

Les explains the whole deal of what happened with Susan to Cayla who accepts it with little hesitation but worries about the reaction of others as the picture gets passed around. Summer, embarassed over the whole thing, decides to cosplay as the Unabomber to hide her identity.

*Check out her forgotten first book: Infunkstrial Society and Its Future.*

The photo has quickly spread around school so Nate calls Les and Susan in so they can explain what it’s about. Any blowback Les could have received is immediately dealt with by Susan sacrificing herself and taking all the blame instead.

Susan decides to resign from her position and tells Les that she’s making a clean break from Westview entirely. Les makes a bunch of pithy and somewhat insulting remarks over the whole thing like the giant tool that he is.

And then decides to bid goodye to Susan with what might be one of the most eyerollingly stupid and infuriating things he says in the entire 50 year run of the strip.

“Heck of a kiss,” are you fucking kidding me? What a Grade-A turbo douche.

Susan gets one final sad and lonely trip down the halls of Westview High, reminiscing over her life there before exiting the school and thus the strip entirely.

Perhaps because people might have thought that Susan went off to try and kill herself once more, in the waning days of the strip Batty will randomly follow up this story with the immediate aftermath. Susan stops at a bridge, gets out and looks over the side but gets a pep talk by the conveniently passing by Ed Crankshaft.

But, and this is a real knee slapper, it turns out that Susan’s car merely ran out of gas. Ha ha, you thought she was going to toss herself off of the bridge because she’d tried to commit suicide before! Isn’t that hilarious!? Suicide Suzy, that’s what they call her!

Thus ends the dumbest love triangle in history and all I really got out of it, besides Les being insufferable and Cayla being Cayla, is that for whatever reason TB really seemed to develop a strong dislike for Susan. Why that is, I can’t really say. I’m sure if you asked him he would say he was just adding some drama and didn’t mean anything by it but come on, I don’t think it’s possible to read that love triangle storyline and Susan’s role in it as an antagonist and roadblock for Cayla, who Keisha actively dislikes and who Summer doesn’t seem overly fond of either, and then get that week in October 2022 clearly playing off of her long ago suicide attempt and think that Batty has anything other than disdain for Susan. It’s one of the most baffling things about the entire strip, there’s no real reason for it but it’s there, clear as day.

Speaking of, while the identity of who took and spread around that photo is unknown I’m 100% convinced it was Keisha. I don’t really have any reason not to think otherwise and completely ruining another person’s life would be an easy way to get that person out of her mother’s way. I’d wonder why she cares so much about making sure that Cayla gets with Les, of all people, but I think in reality it’s not like Cayla could do much better. She’s such a nonentity as a person that I think it would drive most people insane but Les loves someone like that who exists to feed his own ego. Also, if we’re going off the idea that Keisha was behind the photo then that makes her easily one of the most rotten characters in the entire strip.

You’ll notice that once again, Summer pretty quickly disappeared from this little recap because as I’ve said before Batty obviously lost interest in her pretty quickly. After she blows out her knee she mostly exists as scene filler for the first half of the year. But that will change at least a little bit because next time will cover the rest of Summer’s time in high school.

Fadeaway

2009 saw a decent amount of stuff for Summer, largely with her rivalry-turned-friendship with Big Walnut Tech transfer “Breakfast Cereal” Keisha Williams. It was a story that weaved its way into a larger one involving Les, Keisha’s mother Cayla and the beginnings of the love triangle that involved the both of them and Les’ former student Susan Smith. Lisa continued to haunt the strip both figuratively and literally in the forms of Les beginning to write Lisa’s Story — the Holy Bible of the Batiukverse — and the real ectoplasmic form of Dead Lisa, creepily watching her husband make out with his new gal pal.

The underage Summer also had to deal with getting sexually harassed by the much older and very creepy Pete as the year ended… and we’ve reached the point where things are going to start going downhill for Westview’s Messiah. Not in the sense of bad things happening to her but rather as we enter into 2010 we’re now about halfway through Summer’s time in high school and we’ve about hit the point where Batty is beginning to grow bored of her.

In a broader context, the end of 2009 and start of 2010 revolved around Les traveling to, where else, New York City to meet high-powered literary agent Ann Apple and Batty pulls the oh so hilarious (not really) trope where the reader knows that Ann is really Apple Annie, the homeless woman who’d found the manuscript for Les’ book about John Darling (whose murder would leave Jessica Darling fatherless), but Les is too much of an ignorant buffoon to put 2 and 2 together to make 4.

Summer gets that small cameo there but does get a more important role the next week in a series dedicated to Les and Cayla watching her play, with Les fretting over her driving because he’s worried she’s going to end up like Becky.

I get the intent is to show Les being overly worried as parents tend to do and in a sense I can even see where he’s coming from because I’m also the type of person whose brain goes to absurd worst case scenarios. To this day I’ve never been on a roller coaster because I’m completely convinced I’m going to get the one that gets stuck upside down in a loop for two hours or flies off the track or something. But most people would rightly see that as just ridiculous anxiety and so it is here. Although I suppose the prevelance of conveniently placed cliffs along the equally convenient narrow mountain roads that surround Westview makes this a slightly more understandable concern.

There’s also some ironic comparisons between Les the uber-geek and Summer the uber-jock.

*As the kids say, she got that dawg in her.*

I’ll give Batty some credit in that typically he does a good enough job of showing Summer as being confident, driven to succeed and enjoying finding herself in high pressure situations. She is definitely the type of person who would attempt hero ball stuff. At least her athletic prowess is something we get to see repeatedly so we understand why people would praise her unlike with things like Les’ writing talent or Funky’s ability to make a pizza or Pete’s… everything.

Summer ends up sinking the game winning shot and Les relents on his driving fears.

The next week is some nonsense about Montoni’s and karma that I’m only bringing up as it contains one very important debut.

Anyway, Summer does at least get the Sunday comic that week which is more gushing over her being the greatest white basketball player since Larry Bird.

Apparently the Lady Scapegoats have done well enough this season to make the state tournament or I guess this is to determine the conference champion who would represent the conference in the state tournament? I think Batty is confused about state and conference because Bull gives a pep talk to his team before the game against Big Walnut Tech saying they’d be champions after this but it’s also a tournament game somehow.

And naturally Summer gets to play hero again.

But in reality Summer and her on-court success is secondary to what the actual story of this arc is about which is Wally’s PTSD.

After having twice been shot down and captured, after losing a decade of his life to it the second time, after having his family stolen from him by a skunk-haired comic book shop owner, after having the love of his life cruelly cast him aside, Rana — the only person who seems to remotely care about him — invites him to come out to the game because it may be the last time he can watch her cheer. Why, I have no clue. Summer’s generation isn’t close to graduating yet so Rana isn’t going to stop being a cheerleader any time soon. All the excitement of the game causes Wally to freak out which leads to him getting chased down by Funky and Becky who drive him back to his apartment and find out he sleeps with a gun under his pillow. Funky then gets Wally set up with counseling.

All of this plays out over about a month and a half so Summer and her team’s (conference?) championship is really little more than window dressing.

But hey, they still did win which put them in the state championship game. Les goes back to playing the overly worried parent and acts as if Columbus is like Baltimore or 1980s NYC or something. My impression of Columbus is that it’s basically Blandville, USA based entirely on it being used as the ideal test market for stuff but maybe there’s lots of crime to worry about.

Westview’s opponent is a school called Our Lady of the Cedars which I guess is supposed to be Batty’s way of telling the reader that they’re big and bad and that’s why the She-Goats are so scared of them.

Their fear turns out to be justified because Cedars pretty much stomps them into the dirt. Not even Summer’s main character boost are enough to put a dent in them.

There was, then, no joy in Westview because the Lady Scapegoats got their asses kicked.

But like the savior figure she is, Summer vows to rise from the dead. Figuratively but you never know.

The team in fact are a bunch of masochists as the beating laid down on them has only fired them up. Summer and Keisha are named co-captains in an “unusual move” so the team is ready to go next season.

*Even more unusual, Bull is talking like a sideline reporter.*

Summer subsequently decides to get an early start on training.

And that’s basically it for Summer’s relevance for the rest of the year. What I said earlier about what Summer’s stuff being mostly window dressing for Wally’s story? It’s basically going to be that on overdrive for the rest of 2010 because with Summer’s sporto BS over and done with, Batty can now move forward with what the readers really yearn for: Lisa’s Story and Les’ love life.

Most of the next month and change of strips is dedicated to Les and Funky going to New York to close down Montoni’s. But of course the actual meat of the story is Les meeting with Ann who’s set him up with a deal for Kent State Press to publish Lisa’s Story just like in real life because this is the point where Les has really morphed into Tom Batiuk’s avatar more than he already was. From this point on it’s book signings, shilling collected editions and collared shirts under sweaters for Les.

This actually gets into another irritating problem Batiuk has that I suspect Funky’s expansion of Montoni’s was a victim of. That being that things are only as important as they in service to the immediate plot needs of Les or some other pet character. That’s clunkily worded I’m sure so let me explain.

At the beginning of Act III, Funky has turned Montoni’s into a chain and expanded into New York City. Because Funky is busy all over Ohio and now New York, Les takes a second job at the original Montoni’s to help him out. He’s now a Montoni’s employee in addition to being Funky’s best friend which means that he now has a reason to travel to the NYC location. The first time is when Funky sends him to “put out some fires” there but do we ever actually see him doing any of this? No, he wanders around NYC, reminisces over Lisa, meets with Cindy and then has a revelation about his writing. The needing to constantly go to New York means that Les is able to keep in touch with Cindy who in turn connects him with Ann Apple which then gives Les further reason to go and meet with her. With Les’ book deal for Lisa’s Story secured, he no longer needs a plot excuse to keep going to New York and thus Montoni’s closes down because its only purpose for existing was as a plot device to facilitate Les coming and going from NYC to advance his writing career.

It’s quite sad when you think about it. Funky’s business success is pretty much a giant farce, existing only to prop up the second biggest loser in the entire strip.

With his book deal in hand and NYC Montoni’s consigned to the dust bin, Les finally returns to Westview. He’s met not by Cayla or his daughter or friends but by Susan who’s just over the moon. Summer, arriving back from something to do with softball, doesn’t seem overly happy to see her.

Les continues paying more attention to Susan than Cayla as Susan is, you know, actually helping him do work on his manuscript as opposed to sulking around like Cayla. Summer continues to be nonplussed about the whole thing.

Now you’d think that this would lead to a story where Summer confronts her dad about ignoring his girlfriend by paying attention to this horrible homewrecking harlot. But of course Batty is the master of going nowhere as slowly as possible so nothing ever comes of this aside from Summers’ disapproving looks. Who needs her having a talk with her dad about all of this when there are far more important stories to tell?

The next two months are taken up by the tragicomedy (unintended of course) of Funky having to move his dementia-addled father to a nursing home and then getting into a car wreck. The collision rockets him through time, transporting him back to the days of Act I where he wanders around town and tells his younger self to buy a Starbuck Jones comic because it’ll be worth a lot one day and that’s really it. It’s a story that meanders as aimlessly as the title character does and then eventually ends with Funky waking up in the hospital to discover it was all a dream… or was it!? Because at the start of the story Funky gave DSH a rare Starbuck Jones comic so he’d have the money to cover the Komix Korner’s rent claiming that “some old guy” told him to buy it when he was younger. The implication of course is that the old guy was in fact Funky himself per the events of the “dream” that we had witnessed and the whole thing was some kind of time loop.

Time travel stories and them being dismissed as mere dreams? I’m sure glad that will never come up again in this series.

That’s followed up with more Winkerbean wackiness when perennial scene filler Rachel starts dating the highly traumatized Wally beginning her journey to become what every Batiukian woman aspires to be: a mommy-wife who exists to solve her man’s problems. It’s not until the end of August, a full three months since her last appearance, when Summer pops in to remind the readers she still exists.

Around just long enough to tell her dad that it’s cool to start his literary career inside the sad remains of a once proud pizza empire, Summer disappears as quickly as she’d appeared so ~~Batty~~ Funky can say goodbye to his beloved PT Cruiser and Les can have a sitdown with Cayla and Susan to… help him choose the cover of his book. Because this farce of a story needs to be stretched out in increasingly inane ways. Cayla’s spent the last few months feeling left out in the cold by all the attention Les is paying to that little tramp and decides to do something about it. Does she confront Les and tell him how she feels about all of this directly? Does she maybe get into a catfight with the younger but far less athletic Susan?

No, of course not. She just changes her hair as some kind of weird passive-aggressive power move intended to one-up Susan which works, for now, because of course it does. Cayla: 1, Susan: 0, Readers: -500.

Summer makes her customary monthly appearance to go “WOW CAYLA, COOL HAIR!” and slink back into increasing irrelevancy.

And I do mean monthly because it’s about 1 month on the dot when she next shows up during the book launch to talk about Ann, inadvertantly creating jealousy in both Cayla and Susan.

Unfortunately this does not lead to an absurd story of the two love rivals teaming up to deal with a schizophrenic homeless woman masquerading as a literary agent. Missed opportunities, I say. Again, it’s another month before Summer shows up, throwing it down like she was Shawn Kemp.

Since October, Les has been on a book tour because at this point while he’s still technically a teacher, his appearances actually teaching classes are largely over and done with. His real career of flying around to engage in book signings where he wryly mocks all the people taking time out of their day and money out of their wallets to support him has begun. Why Batty even continues with the charade of Les being a teacher is beyond me, he even calls attention to it by having Nate handwave it away.

*Maybe Nate’s just glad he’s not around.*

Summer gets slightly more to do for once with Les checking in on her…

…and having to deal with the dreaded task of talking someone through using technology over the phone, presumably because she’s considered tech savvy for knowing how to turn on and off a computer.

By the middle of December, the first of an unending parade of book tours is finished and Les is ready to head home but a mysterious voice from beyond the grave pleads with him not to get on the plane.

Les believes he’s being pranked and angrily walks — with anger — onto his seemingly doomed flight. Summer is supposed to pick him up from the airport but has yet to hear from him.

Tension builds as Batty ends the week with a cliffhanger.

But Batty does his best R.L. Stine impression and the cliffhanger turns out to be nothing as Les, unfortunately, shows up at the Taj Moore-hal fine and dandy.

Les explains to Summer and Cayla that it’s “a long story” of which we only catch the tail end of.

But oho! That’s not quite the end of it because TB has one final curveball to throw at us.

Yes, that’s right, Lisa used her ghostly powers to call in a bomb threat and commit (fake) terrorism in order to save the life of her still living husband either out of genuine concern for his wellbeing or simply so he doesn’t bother her for eternity in the afterlife considering he keeps summoning her to Earth for inane crap as is.

With Les’ life saved from another ValuJet incident, the family is able to celebrate Christmas together.

So 2010 turned out to be a pretty down year for Summer on the whole. Aside from the basketball stuff in the earlier part of the year she was mostly relegated to one-off appearances for the majority of the year… when TB could be bothered to actually have her show up at all. Even then, a good chunk of that basketball story is really just there to provide background noise in service to Wally’s PTSD story or to Les’ parental worries. It’s really only when the Scapegoats are getting destroyed in the championship game that it’s kind of about her and the team specifically.

Which really gets into the heart of the problem with Summer’s use while she’s in high school. As I’d mentioned earlier, Batty typically does fine (by his standards) in showing that Summer’s supposed to be a talented athlete as opposed to simply telling us she is and then leaving us to actually believe that it’s true as he does with so many other “talented” characters. The problem though is that’s all that she does. Think about it, since Act III has started how many stories has she had that were about anything other than her playing basketball? I don’t mean her being involved in a story, like where she’s the one who convinces Les to write Lisa’s Story, I mean stories that are about her specifically.

All I can really think of is the 16th birthday at the NICU for premature births, her wanting to drive and her being pissy over not having a date to the winter dance. Everything else is basketball and if she’s not playing basketball she’s playing softball. Otherwise she’s basically just there to hang around Les and encourage him or gush over Cayla, basically acting like a shipper.

For a character who was supposed to be so important to Act III she’s pretty quickly relegated to the sidelines and in a couple of years it’s only going to get worse.

Love Duds

When last we left this examination of the life and times of Summer Moore, the retiring Betty Somethingorother was replaced as Westview High’s secretary by Cayla Williams. As we all know, Cayla will eventually be Les Moore’s second wife and Summer’s stepmother. She also happens to be the daughter of Smokey Williams, a pro baseball player who had appeared much earlier in Crankshaft being mentored by the crusty old bus driver. Cayla’s future position as Queen of the Taj Moore-hal will not be for a while, though Batty will get to kindling that fire in this, the year of love.

But love can take many forms of course such as the bonds between parent and child which will be somewhat tested this summer when our Messiah finds that her genetic contributor will be spending the time off from school making a nuisance of himself at her hangout spot.

In fact, Sporto Spice already has a backup plan by spending the summer playing youth softball which dear old dad sees as a potential gravy train.

*Not pictured is the fourth panel where Les’ eyes turn into dollar signs with a CHA-CHING sound effect.*

And it’s not just going to be Summer because Linda has noticed Jinx giving her father the typical teenager attitude because they’re just, you know, so opposite and all and decides to solve this problem by meddling. First by signing her daughter up for the same softball league behind her back.

While also signing up Bull to coach behind his back, christening it a bonding exercise for the two them and gloating about how her scheme is already working.

Now on the subject of love, Batty gives us this rather peculiar Sunday strip at the beginning of July.

*Tension isn’t the only thing building.*

This has nothing to do with anything, of course, but when I was collecting material for this piece I came across this and just had to grab it. This has to stand as one of the most bizarre strips in the comic’s history, right up there with Zanzibar, the Gun-Wielding Primate. Now I can clearly guess that Batty’s intention was just a simple “Pete gets pulled over and the cop’s amused by his wit and lets him off” kind of gag but I mean… he and Ayers had to know what they were doing right? The dialogue, the little knowing looks between them and the cop’s fierce way of walking away. A big Pride float filled with leather daddies going down Westview’s main street wouldn’t be near as homoerotic as this exchange between Mopey and Officer Sassy.

And now that I’ve given the yaoi fans the fuel that they’ve undoubtedly been craving, we go to the opposite end of the spectrum as Jinx is just thrilled, positively elated even, to be on the same team as Summer.

*TB was really on something this month.*

But ultimately this is more of a Jinx story where Summer is just along for the ride and it’s about her one shot of relevance in the strip’s entirety.

Meanwhile, while the girls play, the douche has been away having been sent off to New York by Funky to “take care of some things” at Montoni’s NYC location for him.

What that something is we never actually find out because instead Les’ entire trip is spent wandering around NYC talking to Cindy, bemoaning his so-far-failed writing career or reminiscing about his and Lisa’s honeymoon… anything except doing his goddamned job which will be a startlingly common thing with him going forward. It’s during this trip that we also learn that love never dies, it just remains trapped in a depressing purgatory that leaves you looking like an utter lunatic to everyone around you.

That’s right, everyone’s favorite wraith has made her entry into the comic ready to show up at only the most inopportune and awkward times.

Les returns home to news of The Coming Reunion and decides to spend all day moping about getting old and telling his bemused daughter that the ravages of time shall be visiting her too.

By this point Summer has turned 16 and her hospital is throwing a party for all the NICU kids like her who are also turning 16 this year.

And not content to haunting this earthly realm in spectral form, Lisa has left Summer a little birthday present. We get the first of Lisa’s video messages so she can lecture, chastize and threaten the world of the living from beyond the grave. She takes advantage of this inspired bit of forethought to tell Summer the harrowing story of how her half-brother was almost named Econoline.

*“Now, my lovely daughter, I want you to find my diary so you can have all the filthy details. This, your mother commands!”*

By the way, Lisa sounds like Doris Grau in my head whenever these cancer video strips pop up.

In September a new player enters the scene when Susan Smith returns as a full time teacher at Westview, crossing paths with what will be one of the other parts of the most nonsensical love triangle imaginable.

In October it’s time for another Lisa’s Legacy run with everyone oohing and aahing over Summer for how she’s helped organize the event. She’s also shown hanging out with Cory who’s been forced to come by his parents.

Unfortunately all the money raised this year has been stolen but Funky graciously offers to have Montoni’s cover the amount which Summer has to accept on behalf of her dithering dad.

Of course we immediately find out that Cory stole the money, Holly and Funky know and Funky declares it the “last time I cover for you.” As should be expected though, the shock of Cory being the thief is what’s most important so this is never again followed up on. Cory stole thousands of dollars and basically got away with it. Great writing, Batty!

And speaking of the complete opposite of great writing, soon after Les is moping around because yet another of his crappy stories has been rejected.

*How could they reject “Majors League: The Unauthorized Biography of Mike Majors”?*

In despair Les tells Summer to file it away with all the other garbage. But our curious as a cat savior spies something.

After a quick perusal of it she tells her father to use it instead.

And thus is born Lisa’s Story, the third part of the unholy trinity that will allow Lisa to forever haunt this series for the rest of its life.

With school back up in full swing and Summer now on the varsity squad, life decides to throw her a few curveballs. First up is the loss of the team’s coach who like St. Lisa before her decided to leave Westview for Seattle. Forced to take her place, and still fretting over coaching girls, is newly minted athletic director Bull Bushka.

And he’s not the only new arrival because also transferring is Big Walnut Tech’s star player, Keisha Williams.

Summer is naturally none too happy that she now has competition for the spot of being the team’s star player.

I will give Batty some credit in actually giving Summer a somewhat negative character trait but not overplaying it too much. One would expect someone with the competitive drive to be a star athlete to also have a bit of arrogance to them and not really take kindly to threats to their status. Of course it’s not overplayed for the reason that almost all of his stories ultimately go nowhere but hey, it’s something.

Les decides to take the opportunity to tease Summer about her feeling threatened.

And in a Sunday strip we get Summer tagging along for the incredibly rare Maddie-centric comic as she buys a hat that’s just like her father’s.

*Thankfully TB didn’t also have her decide to start living in her locker.*

Les and Cayla both show up to basketball practice and Cayla decides for some ungodly reason to begin flirting with Les while also revealing that she’s Ketamine’s mother.

At this same time Summer gets picked to be part of the court at the Winterfest dance but is bemoaning not having a date. We also learn that she has apparently been dating — and broken up with — a mysterious “Ron” the whole time so I amend my statement a bit from the previous entry. Now if you thought that showing Summer with a boyfriend, you know the kind of thing that would good both for her and for doing stories about a father dealing with his kid growing up, would be important… well you’re not Tom Batiuk. Maybe Ron just went to a different school in Canada so we couldn’t see him, who knows?

A big school dance would also require a new dress which leads to another Ghost Lisa appearance in what is a favorite strip of readers of this site wherein Les basically yells at his daughter to stop dressing like a tramp.

Cayla, like Les, has signed up to chaperone the dance and makes very subtle come ons to him.

Summer continues to curse the cruel whims of her Flash-obsessed creator. She’s the dateless loser while her dad is going on a date with her rival’s mother? It’s utterly preposterous! Les, of course, plays the role of dense harem manga protagonist to a T just to make him even more annoying.

But lo, the tables turn because Cory has been “volunteered” to ask Summer to the dance.

Cory, despite his protestations to the contrary, doesn’t seem particularly thrilled. I assume going on a date with the school’s popular star athlete was his “punishment” for stealing thousands of dollars from a charity event and maybe he realizes what a farce this whole story and indeed series is.

I don’t know if Batty had any intention of actually doing some kind of a romance between Summer and Cory but if he did then he rightly realized that actually putting Les and Funky’s kids together would have been too lame and cliche a move even for him because this is immediately dropped. One thing he didn’t drop of course is the one between Les and Cayla.

As we can see, TB seemed to be in a bit of a lovin’ mood in the back half of the year. 2008 was the year where he’d had his car crash so maybe that close call led him to a bit of reevaluating that he decided to temporarily reflect in Funky. Whatever the case most of it will end up going nowhere: Summer’s love life, Pete’s flirty little brush with the law, not a one of them.

Summer at least is actually getting a reasonable amount of focus now compared to most of the first year or so of Act III but of course you can still see issues. Batty’s love of doing something shocking only for it to go nowhere is evident in Cory’s stealing of the Lisa’s Legacy money; as I said maybe the date for the Winterfest is the “punishment” but if so then that’s a pretty poor cap to that. Les takes a job at Montoni’s which mostly seems to exist as a reason for him to go to New York so he can mope about his failed writing career and see Lisa’s ghost.

But at least his writing career up to this point can be described as “failed.” Not so for Mopey who, if you remember, is reintroduced in Act III as a successful writer for Marvel. Not brought up here is that he’s now, somehow, moved over to DC to write Superman which leads a multiweek storyline about Pete feeling inadequate and going to Jerry Siegel’s childhood home where he imagines what Siegel (or Pete playing the role of Siegel) must have felt when creating Superman in what is the first of the Pete (and later Darin) flashback to the olden days of comics strips.

Les, of course, is a self-insert for Batty but Pete feels like an even more blatant one at times.

But that’s getting off track and is also enough ranting for one day so I’ll leave things here for now. Batty’s plots may be going nowhere and neither is this retrospective as brother, we still have a long way to go.

Surprise! You’re On Cancer Camera!

Part 1

Part 2

Outside the circumstances of her birth, life has been pretty simple for Summer. I mean true, she is a toddler so it can’t really be all that complicated for her but still, things have been going pretty well for the Moores and the residents of Westview in general minus the occasional hiccup. Sure, John got his hopes up that maybe the pretty one-armed pizza lady was going to give him the time of day only to have them cruelly dashed when that bastard Wally returned.

But Tom Batiuk is an artiste with a vision and soon the misery miasma will blanket Westview once more for he shall unleash upon it’s hatchet-faced denizens his masterpiece.

However at the start of 2005, things are going so good that after only their second date — which followed her being ghosted for most of the previous year — Funky and Holly get engaged! Wally and Lefty are as well so it’s going to be a double wedding at Montoni’s. This wedding stuff will take up well over half of the year and so for a lot of it Summer will only be making some token appearances. In fact it won’t be until February when Summer makes her first appearance of the year, starting to talk and being used to prank her Lego-headed father.

But February is also when we start getting the first hints that things will be taking a decidedly darker turn as Wally begins trying to deal with his PTSD and Roberta Blackburn appears out of nowhere to pester her daughter and son-in-law to be. But she’s also there looking for a gift for Becky’s cousin who just so happens to like comic books so Becky directs her moralizing mother down to Komix Korner where some Japanese works catch her attention and soon, the cops are taking John to the slammer. Presumably for having shit taste in manga.

*“Sir, we’re taking you in on one count of actually liking Rent-A-Girlfriend.”*

So Lisa’s got her big plot for the year, trying to uphold the sanctity of artistic expression and fight obscenity laws and you know… I really in a broad sense do agree with Batty on these types of issues whenever they do come up. After all, I live in the state that produced Jack Thompson and a lot of my formative and not-so-formative years involved hearing about his antics against music, video games and the like. But Batty makes it so damn hard when his arguments for them is delivered in a manner that tends to be overly self-assured in spite of their shallow insipidness. Like Les will go “These articles are important because free speech!” which… yeah? No shit. Or Lisa will stand in front of a jury and go “Comics… are art!” and yeah, of course they are.

But come on, Batty! This is an issue you seem passionate about so whenever you bring it up maybe show a little more fire than “[thing] is good, actually” and then leaving it at that.

With all of these events going on, it’s months before we see Summer again as she shows up during the Winkerbean double wedding in June.

Which then causes her to have marriage on the brain.

*In the end, I don’t think he’ll have to worry about that.*

But once again there’s no time in summer for Summer because it’s taken up by Wally and Becky’s honeymoon to beautiful Afghanistan. Which includes this rather bizarre strip just before Wally leaves.

In a case of Batty just grabbing characters from other works, the implication is that La Choi San — the outdated cariature who doubles as the grandmother of Jade Dragon owner Liu Lin — is actually the Dragon Lady from Terry and the Pirates and is giving Terry’s flight jacket to Wally. It’s a jacket that Wally will wear all throughout the Afghanistan story that takes up a full two months of the strip’s focus, ending with he and Becky deciding to adopt Rana, the younger sister of the girl who rescued Wally during his original MIA phase but who was blown up along with the rest of her family by a car bomb.

Naturally, Lisa adds “adoption” to her plate of legal work to help them bring Rana over to the U.S. just as Becky’s taken the assistant band director job at the high school that was vacated when Kara became Big Walnut Tech’s band director.

Summer is still kind of there, hanging around during a multi-week story about Taj Moore-hal having bats in the attic… Batiuks, if you will hyuck hyuck.

John’s trial occurs and Lisa has her big success with the rousing argument that John can’t be guilty of breaking obscenity laws because comics are art and also the “child” that was in the store when Roberta purchased the pornography — part of the reason John was being charged with breaking obscenity laws — was really an adult midget. It sort of feels like TB wasted months’ worth of time just to get to that punchline too.

The year winds down with some ligther fare like a pun worse than my bats in the attic one.

*Also, web blog? Where do you think the word “blog” comes from Batty?*

And some Christmas shenanigans.

But poor Summer opens up the next year having caught some kind of bug leading to a week of Les having to care for his sick child.

After heroically puking all over her father, she again takes a backseat to Lisa and Holly’s cancer support group as well as Becky learning she’s pregnant. We do get what I believe is the first appearance together of Summer and Cory though.

But it’s the calm before the storm. Things look as if they’re going well and Les is even going to have his story published in the New Yorker which means Summer, and we, get to watch him do a dumb little dance.

But as Lisa’s expression in the last panel indicates, something is wrong. She’d gone in to participate in some genetic testing but something came up and she gets the confirmation just as her and Les are heading out on a vacation to New York.

That’s right folks, it’s been twenty years since The Story That Changed Everything and with his creative fires fueled, Tom Batiuk has decided to give us The Story That Changed Everything II: The Lady with All the Cancers. Les and Lisa go on their vacation but of course the shadow of cancer looms over everything. When they get back, Lisa makes sure to give her daughter a hug and give the audience one of Funky Winkerbean‘s patented cursed close ups.

I would assume that deciding to bring back Lisa’s cancer is when Batty decided to do a second timeskip and it seems to have really put him in a mood because this is when we’re getting all the stuff that seemed to catch the attention of the broader internet in the mid-2000s, making people fascinated by how damn miserable this strip was. Because this is also the same timeframe where Wally gets dragged away from his family and back into active duty in Iraq which, spoilers, will not work out well for him. At all. This is right after construction on the street in front of Montoni’s forced the Jade Dragon to close as well.

But it’s not all bad, at least in-universe, because this is also the period where Darin and Jessica Darling, Whose Father John Darling Was Murdered, become an item when she’s impressed by some quick thinking he pulled to unforunately save Pete from getting his ass kicked by the Rough Riders from Crankshaft. And this is when Bull Bushka gets married to walking buzzkill Linda Lopez, who’d hooked up during summer break the previous year. It’s the kind of story you think we’d actually see but no, because Batty loves his shocking twists and so figured it was best to have everything happen offscreen so he could randomly spring it on the readers.

Why let a story get in the way of a good surprise?

A lot of the rest of 2006 goes back and forth between Lisa’s cancer — which includes repeated appearances by the worst doctor on Earth and a trip to the Grand Canyon — and the stuff with Darin and Jessica. Interspersed is also a goofy story about Montoni’s being profiled by the Food Network which culminates in some kind of Iron Chef style pizza cooking competition show.

Summer’s last significant appearance of 2006 and her first one since showing up in the background before Les and Lisa leave for Arizona isn’t until December.

Batty was too busy with other things to deal with Summer. There’s Becky giving birth, John continuing to pine for her and setting up things that will have zero payoff by establishing Mooch’s relationship with Mindy Murdoch and Crazy Harry’s second kid, both of which will disappear shortly into Act III.

But 2007 starts off with a seeming bright spot for Lisa.

Joy of joys, Lisa’s results are looking good and she’s in remission which seems to be putting her in a much better mood as she can actually appreciate having a kid again. The one she actually has mind you, not the one she gave up and pines for.

Unfortunately for Lisa we’re in the misery porn era of Funky Winkerbean so it’s not long before she learns that her doctor has in fact been utterly incompetent and that they’d mixed up her results with someone else’s.

Now given all of this — that Lisa had gone off her chemo and other treatments for a few months because of their screw up, the fact that said screw up even happened at all — you’d expect the Moores to do something right? I would guess that they probably have a pretty clear case for a malpractice lawsuit. But nope, they just throw up their hands and say nothing can be done. There’s a constant thing whenever Lisa is brought up about what a strong fighter she was right up until the end but no, not really. She immediately gives up and just allows herself to rot away over the next few months.

Because as we all know, Lisa is destined to die and it’s in the summer when she gets the news, delivered to her by Dr. Screwup in the most tactful and courteous manner she can muster.

Now let me digress a bit here to ask, what was Batty’s intention with this character? Was it to portray someone who was ultimately a good and caring doctor who made a little whoopsie doodle because we all make mistakes? Or was she intended to be representative of the real or perceived cold indifference of the American healthcare system? I suspect something closer to the first one given that neither Les nor Lisa treat her with the scorn she rightly deserves for messing up in such a massive way.

And that response? “Months… but don’t ask me how many.” Double fuck Dr. Dipshit. It’s easy to want to criticize various characters for various reasons in Batiuk’s works but I don’t really think any of them are as bad as Dr. Hallet. It’s not just the incompetence but the callous flippancy with which she tells Lisa that she’s going die that makes her so unbelievably repugnant in a setting filled with repugnant jackasses. Les at Bull’s funeral comes close but really, she might be the absolute worst person in the history of the strip.

While this has been going on, the other major story running through the year has been Darin, at Jessica’s urging, searching for his birth mother. There were some starts and stops but eventually the information is released and he learns that Lisa is his bio-mom and decides to convey this via creepily watching Lisa and Summer play in front of Taj Moore-hal.

Maybe someone can tell me whether I’m right or not but I get this feeling that this is a go-to Batty likes to employ as part of his forced dramatics. The whole shot of someone staring at others from their car. I don’t think this is either the first or last time this type of thing occurs but maybe I’m wrong.

From here Darin basically plays real big brother to Summer who now has to face her dying mother though of course is still to young to fully grasp what’s happening.

Shortly after this she enters kindergarten as well.

Lisa’s state is rapidly deteriorating and by September she’s hit the point where she can’t go up and down the stairs and so effectively enters hospice care in the living room.

Batty decides to get in one last minute instance of both closing off a plot thread and setting things up for Act III by having Bull and Linda pop by with the kid they’ve spent most of the year trying to adopt. At that point it’s pretty much the endgame for Lisa. Her parents show up one final time so her dad can apologize for not being there for her even though they’ve been around plenty the last few years.

Finally Masky McDeath appears to usher Lisa into the Great Phantom Zone Beyond and it’s over.

And we immediately smash cut to a goateed Les lying on a couch, speaking to a therapist as it flashes back to him dropping off Summer with the Winkerbeans while he heads to New York to spread Lisa’s ashes in Central Park.

Now Batty’s rationale for fast forwarding through and past everything was that he didn’t want to turn the comic into an extended grieving process but given what happens in Act III that’s obviously a load of crap.

The simple fact is that he wants to tell this grand ongoing narrative but is incapable of thinking of stories as existing beyond themselves. When the Flash beat Weather Wizard that was the end of it, it didn’t affect the next issue and it’s the same approach that Batty likes to take with his stories. Which is fine if you want to do a bunch of loosely connected but self-contained stories but that isn’t what he’s doing. We can see that in the currently ongoing Dinkle Pity Party in Crankshaft where 50+ years of Harry L. Dinkle, the World’s Greatest Band Director is brushed aside as a mere persona created by a man with daddy issues. All the haranguing, egotism, band turkeys… it was just an act to hide Dinkle’s insecurities. None of it was mentioned before this story and I would bet that once it’s over it’ll go in the same box and shoved into the same closet as all the other important stories and revelations like Danny Madison or Bull’s having protected Les from even worse bullying.

Or like Lisa’s death and the fallout from it. A story this big needs to dive into what happens afterwards, how the characters react, how Lisa’s passing affects them. But Batty is incapable of thinking about any of that and to him it’s not important anyway. Lisa dying was what was important and once her life ended so to did the story and it was time to move on to the next one. So the two weeks that TB allots for the story of Les’ NYC sojourn is all we get. This was his big masterpiece of a story and it’s treated with all the gravitas of the ending of a Silver Age comic book as that’s what his storytelling sensibilities are stuck in.

And back to the actual story, we get a little bit with Les returning to tuck Summer into bed and stare forlornly at his now empty bed.

*Don’t worry, Lisa will quite literally be there with you in spirit.*

And, uh, sniff Lisa’s clothes like a giant creepy weirdo.

He finally sits Summer down to explain death to her and that Mommy isn’t coming home at which point we get one final Sunday that transitions to older versions of Les and Summer.

With that, Act II officially closes and we enter into Act III starring the middle-aged Les and the teenage Summer… for now, anyway. We’ve jumped ahead ten years but not really as infamously the timeline was instead shifted back by a decade because I guess TB is so lacking in imagination that he was unable to think of what life would look like in the far off year of 2017. Perhaps it would have had flying cars and ray guns and look like something out of an atomic age sci-fi comic book but maybe not. Best not to risk being wrong.

What will the future of Funky Winkerbean and Summer Moore look like from here? Next time we’ll gaze into tomorrow to look at the future-present of Westview and Batty’s attempts at making Summer into an actual character.

The Littlest Accessory

I will be honest, once I finished the first part of this Summer retrospective I figured I would just take things up through the end or close to the end of Act II. See, it’s kind of hard to talk about Summer in Act II because she’s really not much of a character given that she only just starts kindergarten in the final few months of it. For most of it she’s just a baby or a pre-schooler and really doesn’t seem to exist as an actual character as much as she is a kind of thing that’s drawn into scenes with Les and/or Lisa.

She’s more of a living, baby-shaped accessory than anything else. She’s not a baby who’s secretly an evil genius or anything, she’s just kind of there to add color to scenes. There’s a part of me that wanted to just get through this period as fast as possible because of it but I just couldn’t do it. For one thing, I realized doing that would make this a mega-sized entry and we don’t really need one that’s as long as this insipid Larry Dinkle storyline over in Crankshaft. But I also realized that maybe there’s at least a little value in using Summer’s presence to give us a sort of quickish overview on the last few years of Act II.

By the by, Batty’s inability to keep to a timeline rears its ugly head once more due to a teeny tiny problem. That problem is, once again, the presence of Durwood and the rest of his high school class. Summer is born in summer 2002 and at the end of summer/start of fall in 2007 she’s entering kindergarten which would mean five years in-universe have passed. I’m sure the readers can already see the issue but just to make sure it’s clear to everyone, when Lisa said she was wanting to get pregnant she mentioned that Darin was a junior in high school. Even if we give that Batty doesn’t actually know high school grade names and Darin is actually a freshman, he still should have been out of high school by around 2005. Yet Summer’s entering kindergarten and Darin’s class graduating happens at the same time. So is the Class of ’07 just exceptionally slow? How did it take them six years to finish four grades in high school?

Ah well, there’s no use getting myself worked up over it. Let’s get to what this is actually about. Batty decides to open up the year with some biting humor about how guys like football and some times they get loud while watching it.

Les also shows that now that the new car smell is gone he cares about his daughter roughly as much as he cares about everything that’s not his precious writing.

*Haha, it’s funny because she’s suffocating!*

Now it’s around the period of John Byrne’s stint as artist and all the attempted dramatics of DCH John’s attempts at wooing Becky and getting tossed to the curb because Wally has shown back up in Westview, having survived being blown up in Afghanistan. Inbetween weeks where John’s mother sits forlornly with a Superman cake and John purchasing an engagement ring so he can ask Becky to marry him after like one or two dates, we get a week dedicated to Lesisa deciding to ignore Summer while she cries in the hopes of getting her used to sleeping normally.

With this hurdle cleared, Summer seems to be taking to other major infant milestones quickly such as hitting the point where she begins doing a Michigan J. Frog impression.

This is also the time period where Lisa was starting out as a lawyer with her first job being helping out at a women’s legal center to help deal with a guy who was going after an employee for having breast cancer. That job lasted for as long as Batty needed to do his “Lisa fights for cancer victims” story because the minute the case is over the legal center shuts down forcing Lisa to get a new job. A word is put in for her to work as a public defender in the state’s capital appeals division where she meets yet another sexist jerk when she’s forced to bring Summer along with her to her first day on the job.

She gets assigned to working on a case involving a death row inmate named Danny Madison, a Vietnam veteran who’s up for execution for a robbery and murder. Working with Misogynist Man — real name Mark Potter — we get the impression that he’s less a misogynist and more just an incredibly jaded guy due to the high failure rate of his line of work. I mean if your job was fighting losing battles to keep people from dying you’d probably have a case of the Mondays too, so his introduction kind of sticks out since these sexist tendencies never really crop up again.

For most of the rest of 2003, then, Lisa is busy trying to find any evidence to exonerate Danny. From statements about his PTSD from convenient war buddy and Westview High vice principal Nate Green, to shaky justification for unreliable witness testimony because one of the witnesses to the murder was a shut-in which I guess means her eyes didn’t function or something. So while this is going on, it’s up to Les to play Mr. Mom and take Summer on a playdate where he reacts to lady talk about the way you’d expect him too.

But he manages to overcome his fear of cooties and win the Mom Squad over with pretzels, beer and football proving that old canards about what planets men and women come from wrong (Les, for the record, comes from Hisanus). While Les is wooing the Westview MILF Brigade though, things aren’t going so well for Lisa. Her clever legal tactic of throwing agoraphobes under the bus fails to have much of an effect and it’s looking more and more like Danny’s not going to make it leading to this heartwarming Thanksgiving strip.

As time continues to run short for Danny, Les attempts to introduce Summer to sports.

April finds out that Kortney’s been using sex chatrooms while she’s supposed to be working but Ellie can’t bring herself to fire her, while Liz has started student teaching– wait, that strip’s got me all mixed up.

Anyway, all of Lisa’s efforts have failed which means Danny’s execution is imminent. This leads to the delightful Christmas tale of Lisa having to go to the prison and watch — at his request no less — Danny being executed. Misogynist Mark had told Lisa when she started that he thought she didn’t have the spine enough to stick with the job and after having earned his respect, Lisa decides to prove him right by immediately quitting.

Danny had learned of Summer when talking to Lisa a little before Thanksgiving and when Lisa had come in to tell him that they were out of options, he in turn tells her that he’d made Summer a Christmas present. After his execution we see that it’s a snowman carved out of what I presume is prison soap.

*I suppose it’s better than a shank or prison hooch.* Or a toy made out of the gun that killed your grandfather.

I get that Batty was trying to give a touching end to an otherwise grim story but man, that second panel there is just kind of weird and the emotion doesn’t come through at all. Maybe it needed Ghost Danny or something, I don’t know. But Danny’s more or less forgotten as soon as he’s gone and to start 2004 we see that Les’ inadvertant indoctrination is beginning to take hold and Summer is on the path to becoming a filthy sporto.

Batty also can’t help himself by bringing back one of his favorite tropes: dramatic irony.

*See, it’s funny because they are brother and sister!*

At this point, presaging her eventual future in Act III, Batty’s started getting bored of the little rugrat and so her appearances actually dwindle a lot. She gets some things like a customary appearance during Mother’s Day but she’s mostly just there to hang around as a prop for scenes. This includes a week in August about her birthday party — the prepartion and the actual party — where I’m pretty sure that Summer doesn’t actually appear because he’s more worried about sticking it to helicopter parents for some reason.

One of the big storylines running throughout 2004 is the Moores deciding that being well into adulthood with careers and a kid, they should start looking for a house. More precisely, Lisa decides this while Les pouts and grumbles the whole time. All of their initial attempts, including a crossover week with Crankshaft where they were checking out Lilian’s house, go nowhere. And then in the fall, they find it; the place of their dreams. A cozy little home in a cozy little neighborhood.

*I’m not passing up opportunities to see Les get hurt.*

The Taj Moore-hal has arrived and it hates Les because there’s a running joke for a while of him hitting his head on a low-hanging pipe every time he goes into the basement.

Of course come December, we also get the customary dose of Lisa pining for the son she had to give up while the daughter she actually has sits in blissful, childish ignorance of being Mommy’s Little Runner-Up.

I’ll end things here for now with the close of 2004. There’s some other events that take place this year too such as the start of Funky’s relationship with Holly, which means the first appearances of Cory Winkerbean, as well as the birth of Maddie Klinghorn in the summer. That last one is another thing that throws the sacred timeline off because she’s a full year younger than Summer yet is in the same grade when realistically she shouldn’t be. If TimeMop can’t even keep the timestream clean, I can’t imagine what a poor job he does with the floors and bathrooms.

As I said earlier, it’s a bit hard to write about Summer specifically in Act II because she’s just a toddling prop more than she is an actual character. So I think that next time, for real, I’ll try and get through the rest of Act II and all the fun times with cancer that made this strip famous.